the stag crouched, undisturbed, on the hearth of the peasant, or in the long fern where once was the altar of the village church."*

It is under such circumstances that, in a very brief space of time, there was established a foreign king, a foreign prelacy, and a foreign nobility; and it would seem, at least to our first impressions, that the Saxon race was not only bowed down, but crushed, beneath the Norman yoke; and that the Saxon era, with all its influences, was abruptly divided from later times by a broad line of blood, and a black line of fire and devastation. But great as were the changes, and terrible as were the sufferings, which the Norman conquest brought into England, it was not such a revolution as destroyed the continuity of the nation's life. It is said by the historian who has written with most learning on this period, that "we attribute overmuch to the Norman conquest." This opinion seems just when we turn our thoughts away from the violence I have been speaking of, and consider that the laws of Edward the Confessor were not abolished by the victorious invader; that Saxon earls sat in the council of the realm by the side of the Norman counts; that not a few of the lesser thanes retained possession of their lands, and that the Anglo-Saxon population continued unbroken.

As the body of William the First was about to be committed to its grave, (it was in a churchyard in Normandy,) when the mass had been performed, and an eulogy pronounced on his character, a voice, from the crowd of

* Lives of the English Saints, No. vii. Introduction to the Life of St. Gilbert, p. 2.

† Palgrave's English Commonwealth, Part i. 653.

priests and people, exclaimed: "He whom you have

praised was a robber. The very land on which you stand is mine. By violence he took it from my father; and, in the name of God, I forbid you to bury him in it."* It was an awful rebuke to the pride and injustice of military conquest, when a price had to be paid over the Conqueror's lifeless body to obtain a few feet of earth for the grave of him who, in his life, had added a kingdom to his ancient duchy.

The miseries of England continued during the reigns of the Conqueror's sons; and it was when all Christendom was moved by the splendid enthusiasm of the First Crusade, that the land was scourged with the ferocious tyranny of William Rufus,-the progressive wickedness. of whose nature was strongly described when it was said that "never a night came but he lay down a worse man than he rose, and never a morning but he rose worse than he lay down." He died the death of a wild beast; for all that is surely known is, that he was found in the New Forest, transfixed with an arrow and dead. Whether that arrow was sped to the tyrant's breast by the purposed aim of Walter Tyrrel, or by some one else who drew the bow in the wild spirit of revenge, or whether it was so guided by what we call chance, the people of the time beheld in his death retribution, not only on the cruelty and impiety of Rufus, but on the sins of his father, who had laid waste the homes of the Saxons to make the hunting-ground where, in the loneliness of the forest, his son miserably bled to death.

* Lingard, vol. ii. p. 54.

† British Critic, June, 1843, vol. xxxiii. p. 46. Article on St. Anselm.

The gradual change in the relations of the Saxon and Norman races is shown by the marriage of Henry the First to a Saxon princess, which led, soon afterwards, to the restoration of the Saxon line in the person of Henry the Second. I must pass over the tumultuous usurpation of Stephen, and the imperial reign of the first of the Plantagenets, distinguished by that great controversy worthy of all candid and careful study," the struggle," as Coleridge describes it, "between the men of arms and of letters in the persons of Henry the Second and Thomas à-Becket." To reach the special subject from which I have been longer detained than I anticipated, and for which I am therefore leaving myself less room, I must pass, too, over the reign of the heroic Crusader, the lionhearted Richard, merely remarking that there may be found in the romance of Ivanhoe, not only one of the most vivid representations which Sir Walter Scott has given of the life of a distant age, but also a life-like exhibition of the relations which subsisted between the two races, when they were not yet completely amalgamated into one people. He has represented the partially extinct hostility which imbittered the feelings of the haughty Normans on the one side, and, on the other, not only the Saxon serf, but the high-born thane, whose lineage was from the kings or nobles of England before the Conquest.

It is comparatively easy to understand the hostile attitude in which, during these times, the Saxons and the Normans stood towards each other; for the angry passions of men, and the deeds which are prompted by such feelings, are always more manifest than the influences by which old animosities are appeased. It is easier to comprehend how men are brought to hate one another, than

how that mutual hatred is converted to harmony and peace. Years, and countless and incalculable influences, may be needed to soothe the resentments engendered by one battle; especially when, like the battle of Hastings, it is a victory of invasion. It would be a subject of deep interest to trace the various and manifold agencies working upon the hearts and habits of the Saxons and the Normans, as they dwelt in the same region, at length producing national unity. I cannot pass by one important influence in this harmonizing process-an influence of the church, which has been thus described by a living English author:

"When Anselm (it was in the reign of the second William) came over from his Norman convent to be Archbishop of Canterbury, and his victorious countrymen thought that he, of course, would look upon the old Saxons of the soil as they did, he told them plainly, that a churchman acknowledged no distinction of race, and that his vocation was to be the friend of the poor and distressed wherever he met with them. And these principles, of course with great exceptions and deviations, were acted upon by a large portion of the Norman bishops and clergy. What was the effect? We grew up to be an English nation. The Saxon serf felt that he had a portion and a right in the soil; he recollected the sounds of his native language; he began to speak it: in due time the conquerors and the conquered became one."

The Crusades, too, had probably, by means of the predominant feeling which they inspired, helped to fuse together the Saxon and Norman elements of English nationality; and, when we reach the times of King

John, and enter the thirteenth century, we find the distinction of the two races wholly passed away.

Shakspeare's play of King John is the first, in order of time, of those "Chronicle-Plays," which he gave to his country and the world with the title, originally, of "Histories." It gives a dramatic and imaginative view of an important reign in the annals of England; and the personages, events, and dates, are subjected to the transmuting processes of a great poet's imagination, so as not only not to darken or distort historic truth, but to array it in a living light. We gain a deeper and more abiding sense of the truth, by the help of that fine function of poetic genius, by which the imagination gives unity and moral connection to events that stand apart and unrelated. As to a distant period, time works in harmony with the poet. "The history of our ancient kings," says Coleridge,— "the events of their reigns, I mean,-are like stars in the sky: whatever the real interspaces may be, and however great, they seem close to each other. The stars the events-strike us and remain in our eye, little modified by the difference of dates. An historic drama is, therefore, a collection of events borrowed from history, but connected together, in respect of cause and time, poetically, and by dramatic fiction.”*

The historic poet must carry his subject into the world of imagination; and, in dealing with the multitude of historic men and their deeds, he must do what every true artist, be he poet, painter, or architect, has to dohe must impress the mind with an harmonious sense of plurality and unity. Each character, each action, must

* Literary Remains, vol. ii. p. 161.